SPECIAL REPORT: Susan’s haunting march to hell, 80 years on
Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack vividly recalls her brutal journey through starvation, shootings and despair on the march to Bergen-Belsen
Susan Pollack remembers very clearly the brutality of the “long, long” death march she endured to Bergen Belsen 80 years ago this month.
The 94-year old member of Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre spoke to Jewish News ahead of the landmark anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp that claimed the lives of an estimated 52,000 Jewish and Polish prisoners.
“Some of us, of course, due to lack of food and lack of proper clothes were dying along the way, or were shot. We always had a Nazi with us. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but there were many casualties.
“The few of us who got there, where we were we did not know, the doors, the big gates, opened up and we managed to get in.”
Her arrival at the camp in north-west Germany was the culmination of seven years of terror and brutality for Susan. Born Zsuzsanna Blau on 9 September 1930 in Felsőgöd, 15 miles from Budapest, Hungary, her uncle was murdered by fascists in 1938 and her brother Laci forbidden from attending university due to the inexorable rise of antisemitic sentiment.
When the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, its Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David to identify themselves. Susan’s father was one of many invited to a council meeting to discuss the welfare of Jews in the city. Rounded up into lorries and sent to concentration camps, he was one of many who never returned.
From May of that year, the majority of the country’s Jewish population were deported in cattle trucks, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, including Susan, her mother and brother.
Her mother was immediately sent to the gas chambers; Susan was forced to work as a slave labourer for ten weeks before being sent to an armaments factory in Guben, Germany.
It was from there, as the Allies advanced, that she was sent on the death march. She was just 15.
Left outside the gates of Belsen, she “looked for a place to be inside, perhaps to warm up a bit, not that there was any heating. And remarkably, I met somebody from home, from my village in Felsőgöd, where I was born. And she recognised me. It was an absolute, unpredictable, state of mind. And she asked me, ‘Zsuzsanna’, my Hungarian name, ‘are we going to survive?’ And speaking to her for the first time in many years, I said, ‘We’re almost there’. But I had to crawl back. I wasn’t able to walk any more.”
Susan returned the following day.
“I crawled back to her, and she had, I remember that quite clearly, she had lice all over her face, an indication that she wasn’t alive anymore.”
When the Allied Forces arrived on 15 April, she remembers hearing “shouting all over, that we were free. It didn’t mean anything to us, most of us, of course, because it was almost two years that I’d been incarcerated in different places. The barracks where I was, there were a lot of rotted bodies. I just had to escape from there and I crawled out to the grass. And that’s when I wanted to die having realized, as I said, that my friend wasn’t alive anymore.”
She recalls feeling “a pair of hands, a gentle pair of hands, lifting me up and placing me in a small van. And that’s how I was liberated.”
Susan was hospitalised for tuberculosis, typhoid and severe malnutrition, then sent to Sweden to recover, before moving to Canada where she met her future husband, Abraham, a fellow survivor.
With three children and six grandchildren, Susan has devoted her life to Holocaust education. She says it’s now for the world to learn about antisemitism. “Not us. We want to be accepted where we were born. We want to be accepted like everyone else.We hope that that violent, violent behavior in the countries where we were born will disappear. That is what we hope for. That there won’t be any more exclusion as we had in Hungary and many other countries in Europe.”
Susan says she doesn’t “know about human behavior. I don’t know about the extent that people are willing to go to to destroy us. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she repeats.
“It’s very difficult. I think we have to teach, and that’s why I devoted my life practically, to teach at schools, to go abroad and talk about my experiences of the Holocaust. So it’s for the others to learn, and not only that but to teach the churches and other religions. And to continue teaching.
“It’s catastrophic that in this day anti-Semitism should still take place, because is it through ignorance. Each and every one of us are responsible for each other. Enough of antisemitism; enough of any kind of hatred towards each other, because it has the potential to grow and become unstoppable.”
Fifty members of Susan Pollack’s family were murdered in the Holocaust. She and her brother Laci were the only two survivors.
Thank you for helping to make Jewish News the leading source of news and opinion for the UK Jewish community. Today we're asking for your invaluable help to continue putting our community first in everything we do.
For as little as £5 a month you can help sustain the vital work we do in celebrating and standing up for Jewish life in Britain.
Jewish News holds our community together and keeps us connected. Like a synagogue, it’s where people turn to feel part of something bigger. It also proudly shows the rest of Britain the vibrancy and rich culture of modern Jewish life.
You can make a quick and easy one-off or monthly contribution of £5, £10, £20 or any other sum you’re comfortable with.
100% of your donation will help us continue celebrating our community, in all its dynamic diversity...
Engaging
Being a community platform means so much more than producing a newspaper and website. One of our proudest roles is media partnering with our invaluable charities to amplify the outstanding work they do to help us all.
Celebrating
There’s no shortage of oys in the world but Jewish News takes every opportunity to celebrate the joys too, through projects like Night of Heroes, 40 Under 40 and other compelling countdowns that make the community kvell with pride.
Pioneering
In the first collaboration between media outlets from different faiths, Jewish News worked with British Muslim TV and Church Times to produce a list of young activists leading the way on interfaith understanding.
Campaigning
Royal Mail issued a stamp honouring Holocaust hero Sir Nicholas Winton after a Jewish News campaign attracted more than 100,000 backers. Jewish Newsalso produces special editions of the paper highlighting pressing issues including mental health and Holocaust remembrance.
Easy access
In an age when news is readily accessible, Jewish News provides high-quality content free online and offline, removing any financial barriers to connecting people.
Voice of our community to wider society
The Jewish News team regularly appears on TV, radio and on the pages of the national press to comment on stories about the Jewish community. Easy access to the paper on the streets of London also means Jewish News provides an invaluable window into the community for the country at large.
We hope you agree all this is worth preserving.
